We recently started to relocate "lost" members and have been sending brethren out to visit them. A few of the lost members were offended that we did not call before visiting, and that the missionaries or someone else was told months (or years) ago that they would appreciate a call before a visit.

Can we get a comment box in the membership record so we don't continue offending people? Something simple and not intended for confidential information. It would also be viewable and editable by HP, EQ, and RS secretaries.

stevialarson wrote:Can we get a comment box in the membership record so we don't continue offending people? Something simple and not intended for confidential information. It would also be viewable and editable by HP, EQ, and RS secretaries.

If you'd like to actually make the suggestion, you can send it in via an MLS message or to msrmail@ldsmail.net.

In the meantime, you might consider using a custom field (see Custom fields (MLS) in the wiki). That is already not considered to be confidential information, and can be viewed by people with MLS organizational permissions (the lowest level of permissions). These fields cannot be edited by HP, EQ, and RS secretaries (but then again, nothing in MLS related to an individual can), but they can see the values in these fields in custom reports. So it's fairly close to your request, and is available now.

Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.

While your intentions are good the result could be catastrophic. The ability to add free form notes to membership records could result in dossiers on members. That is not the purpose of the membership record and I doubt that this recommendation would be approved by the brethren. There have been similar discussions about do not contact lists or annotating membership records in MLS for this purpose. See the thread This weekend's tipfor the DNC discussion. It is very similar to an MLS free form text field in many respects.